Leadership (Abuja)
Chamba Simeh
12 June 2008
opinion
Abuja — The trite expression that when you educate a man, you educate an individual, but when you educate a woman you educate a nation may have engendered the special attention being given to the women folk across the globe.
The various declarations, treaties, legislation and resolutions as well as organisational instruments on the girl-child are all geared towards ensuring their unfettered access to education. For instance, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has a right to education. In 1990, the world conference on Education for All (EFA) in Jomtien, Thailand, made a declaration to the effect that every person is entitled to educational opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs.
These international treaties have already been domesticated in our municipal laws. The Child Rights Act 2003 seeks mainly to re-enforce the rights of the child to education, among other fundamental rights. Although rights abuse is not restricted to the girl-child, theirs is a precarious situation given their peculiarities and some misconceived and obfuscating variables with religious and sociological denotations.
The peculiarities of the hiccups for the girl-child flowing from early marriage, the almajiri syndrome or destitution, and religious misnomer have necessitated concerted efforts at tackling the factors militating against girl-child education, particularly in the northern part of Nigeria.
The constraints as already outlined border principally on early marriage. Perhaps, the underlying anecdote will illustrate the scenario: Ten year old Mairo comes from a home of 20 children. Mairo's father does not believe in female education and therefore will not allow any of his daughters to attend formal primary school.
Characteristically, Mairo's father had already betrothed her to a man and she was set to join him as his wife. The union led to a premature pregnancy resulting to difficulty for Mairo to deliver the baby. The resultant consequence was the damage to Mairo's pelvis occasioning a clinical complication referred to as vesico-vagina fistula, better known by its acronym VVF.
For the sake of clarity, VVF and its sister ailment, vesico-rectal fistula, occur when, as a result of prolonged unrelieved obstructed labour, the baby's head tears through the orifice of the mother, creating an opening between the bladder and the vagina, and sometimes, between the vagina and the rectum. The condition is most often associated with childbirth by young girls or small statured women when the pelvis is small and the baby is large. Usually the baby is almost always stillborn and the woman, if she survives, loses control over her bodily functions and as a result, has urine and sometimes faecal matter, constantly trickling down her legs. It is estimated that there are 400,000 cases of VVF in Nigeria. According to the ministry of health, about 10,000 new cases occur annually with about five per 1,000 deliveries. So much for VVF.
Back to the narrative. While wallowing in her ailment and stillbirth, Mairo's husband died leaving her a widow to fend for herself. But without education, vocation or trade, Mairo was unsuitable for any gainful employment and of course lacked the capital to venture into any business. She was therefore, faced with the unenviable option of either begging for alms or hawking on the streets or destitution.
The story of Mairo is not isolated as it depicts the preponderance of cases of educational deprivation of the girl-child especially in the north. Closely tied to the precipitation of this phenomenon which has been variously described as cantankerous societal malaise, a centrifutal societal dysfunction, and a social disequilibrium, is a religious discomfiture (misconception).
Early marriage is prevalent in some northern Muslim communities in the north where many see the practice as a religious injunction. But leading religious leaders have made the clarification that it is not a religious injunction. They accuse the practitioners of ignorance of Islam and of using the religion as a cover for their selfish activities.
They explain that no section of the Qu'aran or Hadith sanctions early marriage or specifies an age for marriage. On the contrary, reference is only made to age of marriage as the age of "sound judgment" and "maturity", both physical and mental. In fact marriage is not encouraged unless a man can cater for his wives' and children's health, religious, educational and socio-economic needs. Islam is emphatically against early marriage or marriage without the mutual consent of the partners.
Scholars of Islamic jurisprudence have emphasised that, "marriages without the consent of both partners are not valid under Islamic law, so sex within forced marriage is rape and parents and religious leaders who force couples to wed are abetting sex crimes". According to them, early marriage is only permissible where it is done to protect the life of the young girl and on the condition that the husband accepts to be responsible for the girl's education. Such a husband also agrees to permit the girl to mature before the consummation of the marriage.
Child destitution, otherwise known as 'Almajiri', is another social problem in most parts of the north and has posed an obstacle to girl-child education, which is an integral part of the Child's Rights Act. The National Council for the Welfare of Destitutes in Nigeria says there are about seven million child and teenage beggars - or Almajirai, in the north of the country. Kano State accounts for more than a million. This classless homesapiens fall squarely into Frantz Fanon's classic: "The Wretched of the Earth". The World Health Organisation says over three percent of this group suffers sexual abuse and neglect.
"Almajiri" is derived from the Arabic word "Al-muhajirin", meaning a seeker of Islamic knowledge. In Nigeria, Almajiri is any child or adult who begs for assistance in the streets or from house to house. Islamic teachings strongly prohibit begging except in special circumstances. They include a man's loss of property in a disaster, or when a man has loaned much of his money for the common good, such as bringing peace between two warring parties.
Children in their dozens are not only found roaming the streets in the north, but have also been "exported" to other towns around the country. Car parks, sidewalks, filling stations and other public places have since been taken over by such children who are deprived of any form of formal education or skill acquisition to ensure successful adulthood. Health workers say they are vulnerable to diseases and social crimes.
Although these barriers against girl-child education appear intractable, they are nonetheless surmountable. Education has been recognised as the most potent weapon used by man to conquer his environment and chart his destiny and even that of others.
Efforts by governments, international agencies and non-governmental organisations at redressing the trend have not been quite successful. Programmes such as the Universal Basic Education (UBE), Nomadic Education and other women empowerment programmes designed within the framework of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are geared at enhancing the prospects of the girl-child education.
Recent efforts by the Education Trust Fund (ETF) under Professor Mahmood Yakubu has helped in bringing to the fore, once again, the relevance of girl-child education especially in some selected states of Kano, Sokoto, Katsina, Jigawa, Gombe and others. The ETF intervention has added to the rare-chain in the promotion of girl-child education in Nigeria.
Also, the senate is pushing a bill seeking to establish a national commission for the eradication of child destitution. The Bill aims at creating an agency of government charged with the responsibility of formulating policies and strategies from the eradication of child destitution in Nigeria. It is also to be mandated with the task of modernizing the "Almajiri" system of education.
Sponsor of the bill, Senator Umaru Tafidan Argungu (PDP Kebbi North), with 31 other senators from all parts of the country, argues that the menace of child destitution has become an embarrassing spectacle in our country. True, the menace of having children roaming the streets begging is not an attribute of a nation that targets to join the league of world industrialized nations in the next 12 years. There could be an Isaac Newton in this neglected group.
In realisation of the girl-child, concerted efforts are being mounted by the governments at various tiers to improve female participation in education and redress the gender inequalities in school enrolment and retention. Quantitative progress has been recorded in terms of enrolment which has seen a large majority of young girls entering school. However, a lot is still needed to be done by the government and other bodies to see the girls complete their schools.
Governments should enact and enforce relevant legislation, which support girls' education and forbid early marriage of school-age-girls. Legislation forbidding other forms of violence against girls should be enacted and strictly enforced. The sharia, beyond the stereotypical media projections and political manipulations of it as law out to cut the limbs of every petty thief and stone every stray women to death, contains an in-built mechanism to address the social and material conditions of Muslims. It is the 'sharia' the poor, ordinary Muslims in Zamfara expected when they came, like a hungry locust swam, in hundreds of thousands, to welcome in 1999. It is the sharia Nigerian Muslims must strive to implement.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 Leadership. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
